Tuesday, March 24, 2015

INDEFINITE DETENTION AND SOLITARY CONFINEMENT NEWSLETTER #3

Compiled by Dick Bennett for a Culture of Peace and
Justice. (#1 Feb. 3, 2012; #2 August 11,
2012).

What’s at stake: In the book
[Give Me Liberty],Wolf looks at times
and places in history where citizens were faced with the closing of an open
society and successfully fought back, and looks back at the ordinary people of
theFounding Fathers of the United States' generation,
the ones not named by history, all of whom had this "vision of
liberty" and moved it forward by putting their lives on the line to make
the vision real. She is an outspoken advocate forcitizenshipand wonders whether younger Americans
have the skills and commitment to act as truecitizens.

In This
Issue:

Inspired and humbled by our clients

Thanks to “Waiting
for Fahd: One Family’s Hope for Life beyond Guantánamo,” you know
something about CCR client Fahd Ghazy, detained at Guantánamo since he was
17, never charged, twice cleared for release, waiting to be reunited with his
teenage daughter whom he last saw as a baby. But today we want to tell you
about some of the other men held illegally and unjustly in Guantánamo. Omar
Farah and Aliya Hussain spent last week at the detention facility and, in
addition to Fahd, met with our clientsTariq
Ba Odah,Mohammed
Al HamiriandGhaleb
Al Bihani. Like Fahd, they are all from Yemen, all cleared for
release – and yet still not free. Aliya and Omar gave a live report back on
their visits from Guantánamoon Thursday;you
can watch it here.

Tariqhas protested his
unjust detention with the only means available, his very body. He has been on
a hunger strike for eight years. Tariq has not eaten since President Obama
was Senator Obama, and the question for the president is, Will he finally
exercise his power and release this extraordinary man before he is former
President Obama? The strength of Tariq’s spirit is almost incomprehensible,
and the damage to his body and the cruelty he must endure every day is
equally unimaginable. He has been on an unbroken hunger strike for eight
years, longer than President Obama has been in office. Each day, he is
forcibly extracted from his cell, strapped to a chair, and force fed through
his nose, but as Omar and Aliya saw in their meeting, he continues to have a
sense of humor, compassion and gratitude to all those who have shown him
solidarity. Mohammedis a poetic thinker and writer,
defiantly good-spirited. We’ve long been inspired by his words from a few
years ago – "We keep walking through the tunnel in search of a shred of
light hoping it would appear at the end of that tunnel... and for every
couple of steps we make, this strong air pushes us one step backward, as if
it is stealing one step from us. Yet we keep walking forward” – and last
month we shared his agony when he said, simply, “I want to be released. I
want to see my mom."Ghaleb,
despite his own harsh confinement, thinks of others; he identifies with the
disenfranchised and downtrodden in the U.S., expressing compassion at their
suffering, and he has a keen awareness of the hypocrisy of U.S. human rights
ideals. That these men are locked in cages while politicians play games with
their lives, feeding fear and prejudice for their own cheap political game,
is an utter outrage. Last week, President Obamapublicly
expressedhis regret
at not closing Guantánamo on his first day of office. No one regrets that
misstep more than our clients, but Obama still has the power to right that
wrong and end the suffering of these men and others today.

Take action to reunite the Khantumanis

The injustices of
Guantánamo do not always end when men are finally released. Last week we told
you about Pardiss Kebriaei’smoving
essay in Harper’sabout
the extraordinary story of our clients Abdul Nasser Khantumani and his son
Muhammed, both held for many years at Guantánamo without charge, now free but
not allowed to see each other. Please take a moment toadd your name to our petitionand help bring the Khantumani
family together again. The Harper’s issue is nowavailable
on newsstands. For the price of two cups of Starbucks coffee, you
can alsobuy
it online. It’s an incredible read, well worth the $6.99 (hard
copy or online).

Taking on abusive immigration
practices

Our challenge to unjust detention policies is not limited
to Guantánamo and the CMUs. InAshker v. Brown, we are suing the State of
California to end long-term solitary
confinement in California’s Pelican Bay prison. And inDetention Watch Network v. ICE, we are working
to expose the federal quota requiring 34,000 immigration detention beds to be
funded and filled per day. Together with Detention Watch Network (DWN), we
are suing DHS and ICE to force them to comply with our FOIA request for
information on the bed mandate. The case is one of two immigration-related
cases we are currently pursuing. The other,Immigrant Defense Project v. ICE, filed with
the Immigrant Defense Project (IDP) and the Hispanic Interest Coalition of
Alabama (HICA), seeks to uncover information related to ICE’s home raids
policies and practices. As CCR supporters may remember from two Fourth
Amendment cases that we successfully settled –Argueta v. ICEandAguilar v. ICE– the federal Immigration Customs
and Enforcement (ICE) agency conducts terrifying, warrantless home raids in
immigrant communities, a practice made notorious in the Bush Administration
and that continues today. These cases are part of our ongoing commitment to
challenge abusive immigration practices.

Window Opens on Secret Camp Within GuantanamoBen Fox, Associated Press, Reader Supported News, April 14,
2014Fox reports: "Attorney James Connell has visited his
client inside the secret Guantanamo prison complex known as Camp 7 only once,
taken in a van with covered windows on a circuitous trek to disguise the route
on the scrub brush-and-cactus covered military base."READ
MORE

Published on Thursday, September 13, 2012 by Common Dreams

Civil Liberties Victory: Judge Halts Indefinite
Detention Law

Judge: "First Amendment rights are guaranteed by the
Constitution and cannot be legislated away"

- Common Dreams staff

A federal judge struck down a law that allows indefinite
detention as a provision of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) on
Wednesday.

Obama has threatened to veto the NDAA over other measures,
including restrictions on transfers from Guantanamo
prison.

On Tuesday, the Senate passed the
National Defense Authorization Act, or NDAA, a yearly military spending bill.

Last year, the bill affirmed the
U.S.’s
authority to hold suspected terrorists indefinitely and without charges. The
provision had generated plenty of controversy,
particularly about whether U.S.
citizens could be detained indefinitely. This year,
the Senate bill says
that citizens can’t be detained in the U.S. – but concerns remain about
the scope of detention powers.

We’ve taken a step back, run through the controversy, and
laid out what’s new.

What does the law currently say about military detention?

Section 1021 of last year’s National Defense Authorization
Act affirms the
military’s ability under the law of war to detain people “without trial until
the end of hostilities.”

It also says they
can be tried at a military commission, transferred to another country or to “an
alternative court” – leaving open the possibility of civilian trials.

Who can be detained?

Anyone who
“planned, authorized, committed, or aided” the 9/11 attacks, or “harbored those
responsible.” Also, anyone who been “part of or substantially supported” Al
Qaeda, the Taliban, “or associated forces that are engaged in hostilities
against the U.S.
and its coalition partners.”

The language in the bill didn’t outright permit or prohibit
indefinite detention of U.S.
citizens. The act stated that
it wouldn’t affect “existing law or authorities relating to the detention of United States citizens, lawful resident aliens
of the United States, or any
other persons who are captured or arrested in the United States.”

But existing laws and authorities don’t actually give a
definitive answer. There were cases involving U.S. citizens held by the military
under President George W. Bush, but no precedents were established. The Supreme
Court ruled only narrowly on the case of Yaser Hamdi,
on the basis that
he was captured on the battlefield in Afghanistan. (Hamdi was released and
went to Saudi Arabia
in 2004.)In a second case, Jose Padilla was transferred to
a civilian court. (For more legal details, see these backgrounders from the
blog Lawfare and
the Congressional
Research Service.)

In signing the bill last year, Obama said that his
administration “will not authorize the indefinite military detention without
trial of American citizens.” Critics were quick to point out that this was a
non-binding policy, and that the law left the door open for future
administrations to interpret it differently.

But this year’s bill fixed all this confusion, right?

Kind of.

In a replay of last year’s debate, a flurry of proposedamendments went
around the Senate in an attempt to clarify the language about indefinite
detention. Ultimately, the Senate passed an amendment from
Senator Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., that seems to protect U.S. citizens:

“An authorization to use military force, a declaration of
war, or any similar authority shall not authorize the detention without charge
or trial of a citizen or lawful permanent resident of the United States apprehended in the United States,
unless an Act of Congress expressly authorizes such detention.”

What about people detained in the U.S. who aren’t citizens or
permanent residents?

They could still be indefinitely detained.

Human rights and civil libertarian groups criticized
the amendment for falling short of the protections in the constitution under the Fifth Amendment,
which says that any “person” in the U.S. be afforded due process.

In the floor debate, Feinstein said she agreed with critics
that allowing anybody in the U.S.
to be detained indefinitely without charges “violates fundamental American
rights.” Feinstein said she didn’t think she had the necessary votes to pass a
due-process guarantee for all.

So does that settle it? Citizens can’t be detained?

Depends which senator you ask.

Some voted for Feinstein’s amendment even though they think
the military should be able to indefinitely detain people within the U.S. They think
her amendment still allows it, because of the last clause – “unless an Act of
Congress expressly authorizes such a detention.”

As the Hill reported,
Senators Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., John McCain, R-Ariz., and Carl Levin, D-Mich.,
all claim that Congress’ 2001 Authorization
for Use of Military Force does authorize the detention of
citizens, even in the U.S. They cited the
Hamdi case, despite the fact that he was captured abroad.

What about last year’s NDAA? Isn’t that an Act of Congress
authorizing detention?

Not expressly. It gets back to that non-position that last
year’s bill settled on--
“Nothing in this section shall be construed to affect existing law or
authorities” about the detention of U.S. citizens.

Does the NDAA go farther than the post-9/11 AUMF?

On the surface, yes, but many courts have already used AUMF
to affirm broad presidential powers.

The AUMF doesn’t
mention detention, or Al Qaeda, the Taliban and associated
forces, which the NDAA claims the U.S. has the authority to detain.
It authorizes “necessary and appropriate force” against anyone involved with or
harboring anyone involved with the 9/11 attacks.

But both Bush and Obama have maintained in court that the
AUMF does authorize detention, and that its authorization applies to Al Qaeda,
the Taliban, and “associated forces.”

So the detention section of the NDAA largely echoes the
authorities that Bush and Obama have previously asserted and gotten through the
courts.

What the NDAA does do, as Lawfare phrased it,
is “put Congress’s stamp of approval” on these claims, which could have
implications for future litigation. The Congressional Research Service report
goes into more detail on
the way that courts have interpreted “associated forces” and “substantial
support”—phrases the NDAA doesn’t attempt to define.

Isn’t there a lawsuit going on over the NDAA?

Yes. Last year, a coalition of journalists and activists
sued to block the indefinite detention provision on constitutional grounds. A
U.S. District Court judge ruled in
their favor in September, claiming that the government had
overstepped in its interpretation of the AUMF. Her decision was stayed by
an appeals court, who found it overly broad. The case is ongoing.

So what happens next?

The bill still has to be reconciled with the House version,
which did not include an amendment to the detention provision like Feinstein’s.

Obama has threatened to
veto the NDAA over other measures, including restrictions on transfers from Guantanamo prison. But
he said the same
thing last year, and ended up signing the bill into law.

CHRIS HEDGES ON THE DECISION and OBAMA

"The decision to vigorously fight Judge Forrest’s
ruling is a further example of the Obama
White House’s steady and relentless assault against civil liberties, an
assault that is more severe than that carried out by George W. Bush. Obama has
refused to restore habeas corpus. He supports the FISA Amendment Act, which
retroactively makes legal what under our Constitution has traditionally been
illegal—warrantless wire tapping, eavesdropping and monitoring directed against
U.S.
citizens. He has used the Espionage Act six times against whistle-blowers who
have exposed government crimes, including war crimes, to the public. He
interprets the 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force Act as giving him the
authority to assassinate U.S.
citizens. And now he wants the right to use the armed forces to throw U.S.
citizens into military prisons, where they will have no right to a trial and no
defined length of detention."

A Progressive Journal of News and Opinion.

We Won—for Now

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/we_won_--_for_now_20120917/

Posted on Sep 17, 2012

By Chris Hedges

In January I sued President Barack Obama over Section
1021(b)(2) of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which authorized
the military to detain U.S. citizens indefinitely, strip them of due process
and hold them in military facilities, including offshore penal colonies. Last
week, round one in the battle to strike down the onerous provision, one that
saw me joined by six other plaintiffs including Noam Chomsky and Daniel
Ellsberg, ended in an unqualified victory for the public. U.S. District Judge
Katherine Forrest, who accepted every one of our challenges to the law, made
her temporary injunction of the section permanent. In short, she declared the
law unconstitutional.

Almost immediately after Judge Forrest ruled, the Obama
administration challenged the decision. Government prosecutors called the
opinion “unprecedented” and said that “the government has compelling arguments
that it should be reversed.” The government added that it was an “extraordinary
injunction of worldwide scope.” Government lawyers asked late Friday for an
immediate stay of Forrest’s ban on the use of the military in domestic policing
and on the empowering of the government to strip U.S. citizens of due process. The
request for a stay was an attempt by the government to get the judge, pending
appeal to a higher court, to grant it the right to continue to use the law.
Forrest swiftly rejected the stay, setting in motion a fast-paced appeal to the
2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and possibly, if her ruling is upheld there,
to the Supreme Court of the United States. The Justice Department sent a letter
to Forrest and the 2nd Circuit late Friday night informing them that at 9 a.m.
Monday the Obama administration would ask the 2nd Circuit for an emergency stay
that would lift Forrest’s injunction. This would allow Obama to continue to
operate with indefinite detention authority until a formal appeal was heard.
The government’s decision has triggered a constitutional showdown between the
president and the judiciary.

“This may be the most significant constitutional standoff
since the Pentagon Papers case,” said Carl Mayer, co-lead counsel for the
plaintiffs.

“The administration of President Obama within the last 48
hours has decided to engage in an all-out campaign to block and overturn an
order of a federal judge,” said co-lead counsel Bruce Afran. “As Judge Forrest
noted in her opinion, nothing is more fundamental in American law than the
possibility that journalists, activists and citizens could lose their liberty,
potentially forever, and the Obama administration has now lined up squarely
with the most conservative elements of the Republican Party to undermine
Americans’ civil liberties.”

The request by the government to keep the law on the books
during the appeal process raises a disturbing question. If the administration
is this anxious to restore this section of the NDAA, is it because the Obama
government has already used it? Or does it have plans to use the section in the
immediate future?

“A Department of Homeland Security bulletin was issued
Friday claiming that the riots [in the Middle East] are likely to come to the U.S. and saying
that DHS is looking for the Islamic leaders of these likely riots,” Afran said.
“It is my view that this is why the government wants to reopen the NDAA—so it
has a tool to round up would-be Islamic protesters before they can launch any
protest, violent or otherwise. Right now there are no legal tools to arrest
would-be protesters. The NDAA would give the government such power. Since the
request to vacate the injunction only comes about on the day of the riots, and
following the DHS bulletin, it seems to me that the two are connected. The
government wants to reopen the NDAA injunction so that they can use it to block
protests.”

The decision to vigorously fight Forrest’s ruling is a
further example of the Obama White House’s steady and relentless assault
against civil liberties, an assault that is more severe than that carried out
by George W. Bush. Obama has refused to restore habeas corpus. He supports the
FISA Amendment Act, which retroactively makes legal what under our Constitution
has traditionally been illegal—warrantless wire tapping, eavesdropping and
monitoring directed against U.S.
citizens. He has used the Espionage Act six times against whistle-blowers who
have exposed government crimes, including war crimes, to the public. He
interprets the 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force Act as giving him the
authority to assassinate U.S.
citizens, as he did the cleric Anwar al-Awlaki. And now he wants the right to
use the armed forces to throw U.S.
citizens into military prisons, where they will have no right to a trial and no
defined length of detention.

Liberal apologists for Barack Obama should read Judge Forrest’s
112-page ruling. It is a chilling explication and denunciation of the massive
erosion of the separation of powers. It courageously challenges the overreach
of Congress and the executive branch in stripping Americans of some of our most
cherished constitutional rights.

In the last 220 years there have been only about 135
judicial rulings that have struck down an act of Congress. Most of the cases
involved abortion or pornography. Very few dealt with wartime powers and the
separation of powers, or what Forrest in her opinion called “a question of
defining an individual’s core liberties.”

Section 1021(b)(2) authorizes the military to detain any U.S.
citizen who “substantially supported” al-Qaida, the Taliban or “associated
forces” and then hold them in military compounds until “the end of
hostilities.” The vagueness of the language, and the refusal to exempt
journalists, means that those of us who as part of our reporting have direct
contact with individuals or groups deemed to be part of a terrorist network can
find ourselves seized and detained under the provision.

“The Government was unable to offer definitions for the
phrases ‘substantially support’ or ‘directly support,’ ” the judge wrote. “In
particular, when the Court asked for one example of what ‘substantially
support’ means, the Government stated, ‘I’m not in a position to give one
specific example.’ When asked about the phrase ‘directly support,’ the
Government stated, ‘I have not thought through exactly and we have not come to
a position on ‘direct support’ and what that means.’ In its pre-trial
memoranda, the Government also did not provide any definitional examples for
those terms.”

The judge’s ruling asked whether a news article deemed by
authorities as favorable to the Taliban could be interpreted as having
“substantially supported” the Taliban.

“How about a YouTube video?” she went on. “Where is the line
between what the government would consider ‘journalistic reporting’ and
‘propaganda?’ Who will make such determinations? Will there be an office
established to read articles, watch videos, and evaluate speeches in order to
make judgments along a spectrum of where the support is ‘modest’ or
‘substantial?’ ”

Forrest concurred with the plaintiffs that the statute
violated our free speech rights and due-process guarantees. She noted that “the
Court repeatedly asked the Government whether those particular past activities
could subject plaintiffs to indefinite detention; the Government refused to
answer.” The judge went on to criticize the nebulous language of the law,
chastising the government because it “did not provide particular definitions.”
She wrote that “the statute’s vagueness falls far short of what due process
requires.”

Although government lawyers argued during the trial that the
law represented no change from prior legislation, they now assert that blocking
it imperils the nation’s security. It is one of numerous contradictions in the
government’s case, many of which were illuminated in Forrest’s opinion. The
government, she wrote, “argues that no future administration could interpret §
1021(b)(2) or the AUMF differently because the two are so clearly the same.
That frankly makes no sense, particularly in light of the Government’s
inability at the March and August hearings to define certain terms in—or the
scope of—§ 1021(b)(2).” The judge said that “Section 1021 appears to be a
legislative attempt at an ex post facto ‘fix’: to provide the President (in
2012) with broader detention authority than was provided in the AUMF
[Authorization to Use Military Force Act] in 2001 and to try and ratify past
detentions which may have occurred under an overly-broad interpretation of the
AUMF.”

The government, in effect, is attempting to push though a
law similar to the legislation that permitted the government to intern 110,000
Japanese-Americans during World War II. This law, if it comes back into force,
would facilitate the mass internment of Muslim Americans as well as those
deemed to “support” groups or activities defined as terrorist by the state. Calling
the 1944 ruling “an embarrassment,” Forrest referred to Korematsu v. United States,
which upheld the government’s internment of Japanese-Americans.

The judge said in her opinion that the government “did not
submit any evidence in support of its positions. It did not call a single
witness, submit a single declaration, or offer a single document at any point
during these proceedings.” She went on to write that she found “the testimony
of each plaintiff credible.”

“At the March hearing, the Court asked whether Hedges’
activities could subject him to detention under § 1021; the Government stated
that it was not prepared to address that question. When asked a similar
question at the August hearing, five months later, the Government remained
unwilling to state whether any of plaintiffs’ (including Hedges’s) protected
First Amendment future activities could subject him or her to detention under §
1021. This Court finds that Hedges has a reasonable fear of detention pursuant
to § 1021(b)(2).”

The government has now lost four times in a litigation that
has gone on almost nine months. It lost the preliminary injunction in May. It
lost a motion for reconsideration shortly thereafter. It lost the permanent
injunction. It lost its request last week for a stay. We won’t stop fighting
this, but it is deeply disturbing that the Obama administration, rather than
protecting our civil liberties and democracy, insists on further eroding them
by expanding the power of the military to seize U.S. citizens and control our
streets.

On New Year's Eve 2011, while you and I were
anticipating the end of the year, President Barack Obama signed a law that
makes U.S.
citizens subject to indefinite detention by military authorities on suspicion
of being terrorists.

The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) principally deals with funding the
Defense Department.

But the measure enacted by Congress and submitted to
Obama contains provisions that allow the executive branch (meaning the
president) to determine whether to order a U.S. citizen detained indefinitely
by military authorities on suspicion of being a terrorist.

If you think that smacks of tyranny, you're right.

If you think Obama is smart enough to know better
than to sign such a measure, you're right.

If you hoped Obama would demonstrate the fortitude
to carry out his publicized threat to veto the legislation if this offensive
provision wasn't removed, you're badly disappointed.

Count me among the badly disappointed people who
know tyranny when we see it.

Wendell
Griffen was the first black person to serve on Ark's Court of Appeals.
He is currently a Circuit Court Judge serving in Little Rock. He is also an ordained minister.

Samantha A.
Peetros, Bill of Rights Defense Committee

4:04 PM (2 hours ago)

Dear Dick,

Every week day, we send you a daily digest of news stories that
matter to you -- news about civil liberties and constitutional rights, and the
many ways our government is threatening their very existence.

And every day, we at the Bill of Rights Defense Committee (BORDC) work to
restore those freedoms and protections. We fight at the local, state, and
national levels to protect individuals from rights abuses. We mobilize
Americans from all walks of life to stand for liberty when our government
won’t. And we will continue doing this work for as long as it takes to bring
our country back to its founding principles of liberty and justice for all.

A brief but comprehensive analysis of the National
Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), Homeland Battlefield Act, sections 1021-22,
which eliminate “all forms of due process, save the writ of habeas corpus.” Critics abound of the expansion of
Executive power and diminution of citizens’ freedoms.

OPINION | Yes, the worst
things you may have heard about the National Defense Authorization Act,
which has formally ended 254 years of
democracy in the United States of
America, and driven a stake through the heart of the bill of rights, are
all really true. The act passed with large margins in both the House and the
Senate on the last day of last year – even as tens of thousands of Americans
were frantically begging their representatives to secure Americans’ habeas
corpus rights in the final version.

It does indeed – contrary to the many flatout-false form letters
I have seen that both senators and representatives sent to their constituents,
misleading them about the fact that the NDAA destroys their due process rights.
Under the act, anyone can be described as a ‘belligerent”. As the
New American website puts it,

“[S]ubsequent clauses (Section 1022, for
example) unlawfully give the president the absolute and unquestionable
authority to deploy the armed forces of the United States to apprehend and to
indefinitely detain those suspected of threatening the security of the
‘homeland’. In the language of this legislation, these people are called
‘covered persons’.

.

“The universe of potential ‘covered persons’
includes every citizen of the United
States of America. Any American could one
day find himself or herself branded a ‘belligerent’ and thus subject to the
complete confiscation of his or her constitutional civil liberties and nearly
never-ending incarceration in a military prison.”

And
with a new bill now being introduced to make it a crime to protest in a way
that disrupts any government process – or to get close to anyone with secret
service protection – the push to legally lock down the United Police States is
in full force.

Overstated? Let’s be clear: the NDAA grants the president the
power to kidnap any American anywhere in the United States and hold him or her
in prison forever without
trial. The president’s own signing statement, incredibly, confirmed that he had
that power. As I have been warning since 2006: there is not a country on the
planet that you can name that has ever set in place a system of torture, and of detention without trial, for an
“other”, supposedly external threat that did not end up using it pretty quickly
on its own citizens.

And Guantánamo has indeed come home: Guantánamo is in our front
yards now and our workplaces; it did not even take much more than half a
decade. On 1 March, the NDAA will go into effect – if
a judicial hearing scheduled for this week does not block it – and
no one in America, no US citizen, will be safe from being detained indefinitely
– in effect, “disappeared.”.

As former Reagan official, now Ron Paul supporter, Bruce Fein points out,
on 1 March, we won’t just lose the bill of rights; we will lose due process
altogether. We will be back at the place where we were, in terms of legal
tradition, before the signing of the Magna Carta – when kings could throw
people in prison at will, to rot there forever. If we had cared more about what
was being done to brown people with Muslim names on a Cuban coastline, and
raised our voices louder against their having been held without charge for
years, or against their being tried in kangaroo courts called military
tribunals, we might now be safer now from a new law mandating for us also the threat of abduction and fear of
perpetual incarceration.

We didn’t care, or we didn’t care enough – and here we are. We
acclimated, we got distracted, the Oscars were coming up … but the fake
“battlefield” was brought home to us, now real enough. Though it is not “we”
versus Muslims in this conflict; it is our very own government versus “us”. As
one of my Facebook
community members remarked bitterly, of our House representatives,
our Senate leaders and our president, “They hate our freedoms.”

The
NDAA is, in the words of Shahid
Buttar of the Bill of Rights Defense Committee, “the worst threat to
civil liberties since COINTELPRO. It gives the government the
power to presume guilt rather than innocence, and indefinitely imprison anyone
accused of a ‘belligerent act’ or terror-related offense without trial.” He
points out that it gives future presidents the power to arrest their political
critics. That may even be understating things: it is actually, in my view, the
worst threat to civil liberty in the US since habeas corpus was last
suspended, during the American civil war.

On
a conference call for media last Friday, hosted by the
cross-partisan BORDC (which now includes the 40,000 members of the American
Freedom Campaign, which we had co-founded as a response to thewarning in 2007 that America
was facing a “fascist shift”) and the right-leaning Tenth Amendment
Foundation, we were all speaking the same language of fear for our freedom,
even though our perspectives spanned the political spectrum. As the Tenth
Amendment Foundation put it, we are a family with diverse views – and families
know when it is time to put aside their differences. If there were ever a time
to do so, it is now.
This grassroots effort is pushing hard in many places. Protests that included
libertarians, progressives, Tea Party members and Occupy participants have been
held nationwide in recent weeks. State
legislators in Virginia, Tennessee, and Washington have also
introduced bills to prevent state agencies from aiding in any detention
operations that might be authorized by the NDAA. In other words, they are
educating sheriffs and police to refuse to comply with the NDAA’s orders. This
presents an Orwellian or 1776-type scenario, depending upon your point of view,
in which the federal government, or even the president, might issue orders to
detain US citizens – which local sheriffs and police would be legally bound to
resist.

What will happen next? I
wrote recently that the US is experiencing something like a
civil war, with only one side at this point – the corporatist side – aggressing.
This grassroots, local-leader movement represents a defensive strategy in what
is being now tacitly recognized as unprovoked aggression against an entire
nation, and an entire people. (Here I should say, mindful of the warning issued
to me by NYPD, which arrested me, to avoid saying anything that could be
construed as “incitement to riot” and that I believe in nonviolent resistance.)

The local resistance to the police state
goes further: midwestern cities, such as Chicago
and Minneapolis,
are considering “torture-free city” resolutions that would prohibit the torture
which civil libertarians see as likely under a military detention regime
expanded by the NDAA. (Bradley Manning’s initial treatment in solitary
confinement, for instance, met some Red Cross definitions of torture.)

But I
am far more scared than hopeful, because nothing about the NDAA’s legislative
passage worked as democracy is supposed to work. Senator Dianne Feinstein, for
instance, in spite of her proposed (defeated) amendment that could have
defended due process more completely, has nonetheless not fought to repeal the
law – even though her constituents in California
would, no doubt, overwhelmingly support her in doing so. Huge majorities passed
this bill into law – despite the fact that Americans across the spectrum were
appalled and besieging their legislators. And this president nailed it to the
table – even though his own constituency is up in arms about it.

History
shows that at this point, there isn’t much time to mount a defense: once the
first few arrests take place, people go quiet. There is only one solution:
organize votes loudly and publicly to defeat every single signer of this bill
in November’s general election. Then, once we have our Republic back and the
rule of law, we can deal with the actual treason that this law represents.

On February 19, 1942,President
Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, authorizing the military
detention of over 120,000 Japanese-Americans, as well as some Italian and German
Americans. They were forced to squalid relocation camps, where they remained
for several years, leaving behind friends, businesses, and lives.

As hysteria and racism against Japanese Americans rose, most went voluntarily.
Fred did not. He challenged his conviction for disobeying the military orders,
but the Supreme Court notoriously ruled against due process inKorematsu
v. United States.

Again, Fred refused to go quietly. In 1983, his conviction was finally
overturned, discrediting the notion that, during times of war, any excess is
acceptable. Fred Korematsu went on to champion civil rights, not only for
Japanese Americans, but also for the diverse Americans whose rights the war on
terror has violated.

Today is a day to honor Fred Korematsu, not only by remembering his legacy, but
also bytaking
actionas he did. With
the NDAA poised to once again enable military detention on US soil, we
must take inspiration from Fred’s example to restore constitutional rights for
all Americans.

Kane reports: "Today, the 33-year-old Hashmi remains under solitary
confinement at
the Administrative Maximum Facility (ADX) near Florence, Colorado,
a maximum security federal prison. In total, he's toiled under the harsh
confines of solitary confinement for six years, doing untold damage to his
mental health."READ MORE

TRADITION OF RESISTANCE IN US

Naomi Wolf, Give Me Liberty (from Wikipedia)

In the book, Wolf looks at times and places in history where citizens
were faced with the closing of an open society and successfully fought back,
and looks back at the ordinary people of theFounding Fathers of the United States' generation,
the ones not named by history, all of whom had this "vision of
liberty" and moved it forward by putting their lives on the line to make
the vision real. She is an outspoken advocate forcitizenshipand wonders whether younger Americans
have the skills and commitment to act as truecitizens.[33]She wrote in 2007:

This lack
of understanding about how democracy works is disturbing enough. But at a time
when our system of government is under assault from an administration that
ignores traditionalchecks and balances, engages inillegal wiretappingand
writes secret laws ontorture,
it means that we're facing an unprecedented crisis. As theFoundersknew,
if citizens are ignorant of or complacent about the proper workings of a
republic "of laws not of men," then any leader of any party – or any
tyrannicalCongressor
even a tyrannical majority – can abuse the power they hold. But at this moment
of threat to the system the Framers set in place, a third of young Americans
don't really understand what they were up to.[34]

INDEFINITE
DETENTION IN CANADA

The Secret Trial 5is a crowdfunded documentary in-progress
that examines the human impact of Canada’s “war on terror”;
specifically the use of security certificates, a tool that allows forindefinite
detention, withno charges, andsecret
evidence. Over the last decade, 5 men have been held under
security certificates in Canada.
They spent between 2 and 7 years in prison each. None of them have been charged
with a crime.

Recent blog posts:

After36 days, and148
contributions, I guess all that's left is to say thank you.
Thank you for proving to a couple of young filmmakers that the last 3 years
have been worthwhile. Thanks for showing us, and the security certificate
families that we are all ready to talk about these issues, and right these
wrongs.

We
raised just over $18k during this campaign, which may not be a lot in the life
of the average documentary, but means everything in the life of THIS documentary.
We wish to sincerely thank Hot Docs for this chance, and in particular,
Elizabeth Radshaw, Stephanie McArthur, Chloe Sosa-Sims, and Patrycja Cieniewicz
for their truly personal support, hard-work, and encouragement during the last
few months.

We want
to take this last opportunity to talk briefly about crowdfunding, and why it so
important for emerging filmmakers. What we did this last month cannot be
quantified. The money can, but the value of Doc Ignite vastly exceeds the money
raised. We have no real idea how many people just learned about our project,
and are now waiting to see the film. Sure, our FB and twitter accounts
exploded, and we know we are reaching tens of thousands every week, but what
exactly does that mean? The answer, is the aforementioned EVERYTHING. It means
everything.

In a
time when audiences are more fragmented then ever, and old models of funding
and even distribution make less and less sense, crowdfunding just fits. It's a
lot of work, but then filmmaking has always been so, and the results when it
works are incredible. Right now, there are thousands of people waiting to see
ST5. A film with little to no money, about a contentious issue, has a small but
devoted audience behind it before it even enters post-production. This is an enviable
position to be in for any film.

What
this will ultimately mean for the film's distribution is anyone's guess. But it
is seriously exciting. So we encourage all filmmakers out there, regardless of
experience and funding, to embrace THEIR CROWD. Take the time to build a
relationship with your audience, and they will not let you down. They don't ask
for creative control, or rights of any kind. They simply want to be let in.
Don't be afraid to share, both in good times and bad. Doc Ignite is a wonderful
initiative. It is an organic reaction by Hot Docs to our climate, so please
take advantage of it. And even without Doc Ignite, do not hesitate to start
your own crowdfunding effort. That's how ST5 started, and it led to the success
of this campaign. We thought we were at a disadvantage having crowdfunded
already. We could not have been more wrong.

We feel
our crowd now, we feel the support. It gives us confidence, and to a young
filmmaker, confidence is invaluable.

Thank
you all once again, we promise to make a good film. An honest film. Where we go
from there (re: security certificates) will be up to Canadians.

We stopped by Newstalk 1010 yesterday to speak to host Tarek
Fatah about our film. Tarek is known to be controversial. This is a great
example of why we are making this film, blanket statements were being thrown
around left, right and center. Warning, it gets pretty heated!Take a listen!

We are
hitting the mainstream! Here is a clip of producer/director Amar Wala on Global
TV's The Morning Show discussing The Secret Trial 5 and our Hot Doc's Doc
Ignite campaign.

We have
until Feb 19 to continue to raise funds. The more we raise the MORE we can do
to spread the word and raise awareness about these important stories! Please
encourage others to become a part of this project.